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In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

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Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#281

Post by zo1 »

gorlilla wrote: post #256
solumunus wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone parrots this. It’s a common belief in the UK too. I’ve never seen any actual evidence that this ever took place. How do you know this? Did you just read it somewhere or is there some meat to it?

We had people saying the same thing where i am in the states. Except that county mwdical examiner records are freely available online and did not reflect that in any way shape or form. There were still, far more deaths from overdose and suicide than Complications of Covid-19.

That's like rebutting complaints of a rigged election by saying "the vote results for each county are freely available online, and look, clearly candidate A's votes add up to 51%!".

The original complaint is that hospitals were (and provably so?) given instructions on how to mark Covid deaths for statistical purposes, and those instructions were biased to inflate the numbers. At the time this was labelled as a "conspiracy theory" in order to drive the narrative, and afterwards it came to light.

"Medical examiner records" can't prove this, because they might as well have been doctored. No non-stupid person would write a report talking about patient having serious conditions A, B, and C, and then fill in a field for "cause of death" with "Covid", so of course you won't find any examples of that.

Let's all be honest, the media got caught with their pants down driving a narrative to fit what they felt was right and what "TPTB" wanted, and we're all in denial now about it. The truth will eventually come out.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#282

Post by zo1 »

timcederman wrote: post #277
jtc331 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that is what pre-COVID masking in hospital settings has shown, yes. Possibly COVID is different from the flu. But the difficulty for proving masking helps is: 1. If it only takes ~20 virions to get infected, then masking has to have a basically perfect filtering rate and be worn perfectly 100% of the time, neither of which is obvious. 2. With an endemic virus even if masks slow down spread they aren't going…

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm > Consistent use of a face mask or respirator in indoor public settings was associated with lower odds of a positive SARS-CoV-2 test result (adjusted odds ratio = 0.44). Use of respirators with higher filtration capacity was associated with the most protection, compared with no mask use. I'll take a reduced risk, even if it's not perfect. Would you prefer to get cov…

How did they account for people "doing something different" when wearing a mask? I.e. did they do a double-blind experiment where people wore masks that had intentional holes in them? So we can know that wearing a mask is the thing to do vs whatever it is that wearing a mask caused that person to do. I guess I'm asking or saying that this might have been some sort of "correlation is not causation" kind of thing?

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#283

Post by account42 »

TurkishPoptart wrote: post #217
account42 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No, it's true. The matter of fact was that some collective hypnosis or lie was happening, and when you told people that the vaccine wasn't meant to stop transmission, they would just get angry from the cognitive dissonance.

Gaslighting me won't change the fact that the public messaging at the time was about herd immunity, i.e. prevent transmission.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#284

Post by mike_hearn »

tripletao wrote: post #271
mike_hearn wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be useful to be able to measure some sort of inherent infectiousness, but R0 as actually defined and computed today is useless. It looks scientific on the surface but everyone who calculates it gets a totally different result, and because there's no actual underlying theory involved (just playing with stats), there's no way to decide which estimate is correct. To get meaningfully constant values for infectio…

> To get meaningfully constant values for infectiousness you'd probably need a theory that let you derive it from RNA sequences. As others have already noted in this thread, the rate at which a disease spreads inherently depends on both the biology of the pathogen and human behavior. For example, if everyone goes to crowded nightclubs, then R0 for an airborne respiratory disease goes up. If everyone stays home, then…

No, I'm not confused about any of this. I'm giving the textbook definition in this thread, right? I'm sure even sure why you are arguing with me instead of the user who started the thread by giving specific R0 numbers for influenza and SARS-CoV-2. As you say, you can't do that because R0s are characteristics of outbreaks, not viruses.

So the confusion is the other way around. An outsider to the field would think R0 would be defined biologically given it's called the "basic reproduction number" and because epidemiologists themselves regularly make claims like "influenza has an R0 of this and measles has an R0 of that", but it takes all of five minutes to discover that the way it's calculated can't support such statements.

That's why as presently defined it's useless. If you can't compare the values with any other value, what are they for? Put another way, claims about R0 aren't falsifiable.

Epidemiology needs to develop far more robust methods that aren't just applying R-the-software to random datasets scraped from the web if it wants to be taken seriously as a field. There are very basic philosophy of science issues here. Argument by textbook gets us nowhere, because the textbooks are themselves written by people engaged in unscientific practices. The expectation by outsiders is reasonable, the actual way things operate isn't.

Therefore, my suggestion - meant constructively! - is to rebase the field on top of microbiological theory. Scrap the models for now. Delete "and everything else" from the R0 definition and come up with an algorithm to compute a measure of infectiousness from DNA/RNA or lab experiments only. Once you've got a base definition that lets different labs replicate each other's numbers, you can start to incorporate other aspects (under new variable names) like immune system strength, population density grids etc.

Such definitions won't let you give governments predictions of hospital bed demand right away, and indeed may not let you calculate much of real world value for a while, but the field isn't able to do that successfully today anyway. COVID models were all well off reality. What it would do though, is put epidemiology on track to one day deliver accurate results based on a firm theoretical foundation.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#285

Post by mike_hearn »

tripletao wrote: post #276
mike_hearn wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they did exactly what we're saying they do? The paper sets up some ad-hoc models unique to this academic group and then reversed them to find values of R0 that could fit. The problem is underdetermined so there are a huge array of values that could work. Key line: > Overall, we report R0 values are likely be between 4.7 and 6.6 with a CI between 2.8 to 11.3 That's an extremely wide CI by any measure. It's a bit un…

There's some minor variation due to different curve-fitting approaches, but the big variation (e.g. R0 from 3.7–203.3 for measles, per my other comment here) is real, simply because the environment or human behavior varied. As others have repeatedly noted, R0 is a function not just of the pathogen, but also of its environment, including the behavior of its human hosts. Earlier, you wrote: > It [R0] was never being es…

Briefly, as the substance is discussed in my other reply:

> the big variation (e.g. R0 from 3.7–203.3 for measles, per my other comment here) is real

Morpheus: "What is real? How do you define, real?"

CIs that wide are just an obfuscated way of saying "we have no idea what's going on or what will happen". Anyone can make predictions that way. For example by the end my life my bank balance will be $4.7 million (CI $5.00-$50M). Those numbers aren't "real" in any meaningful sense. Anyone can express don't-know in sophisticated looking numerical form, and they wouldn't justify me claiming to be a financial expert on the back of them.

> any more than you could define the growth rate of a plant independent of weather and soil fertility.

You can define growth rate of a plant this way: define a standardized lab environment with regularized soil composition and artificial light/watering schedules. Then plant seeds and measure the dry weight at the end of a fixed time period. This will give you a number that's comparable across species. There are other definitions you could use because "growth rate" is slightly ambiguous in English (does a tree grow faster than a weed because the tree achieves bigger mass?), but that's the general idea.

What you shouldn't do is just grab datasets of wildly varying quality off the internet, fit an equation you just invented on the spot to that data, and announce you've discovered something real about the plants in the data. That would indeed yield a growth rate that doesn't tell you anything meaningful.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#286

Post by TurkishPoptart »

account42 wrote: post #283
TurkishPoptart wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's true. The matter of fact was that some collective hypnosis or lie was happening, and when you told people that the vaccine wasn't meant to stop transmission, they would just get angry from the cognitive dissonance.

Gaslighting me won't change the fact that the public messaging at the time was about herd immunity, i.e. prevent transmission.

No, we, who are rational truth-seekers, are the ones who were gaslit for 2+ years about the whole idea of "natural immunity". Despite having had covid and recovered from it, we were still told we needed to vaccinate even AFTER recovering from it.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#287

Post by tripletao »

mike_hearn wrote: post #285
tripletao wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some minor variation due to different curve-fitting approaches, but the big variation (e.g. R0 from 3.7–203.3 for measles, per my other comment here) is real, simply because the environment or human behavior varied. As others have repeatedly noted, R0 is a function not just of the pathogen, but also of its environment, including the behavior of its human hosts. Earlier, you wrote: > It [R0] was never being es…

Briefly, as the substance is discussed in my other reply: > the big variation (e.g. R0 from 3.7–203.3 for measles, per my other comment here) is real Morpheus: "What is real? How do you define, real?" CIs that wide are just an obfuscated way of saying "we have no idea what's going on or what will happen". Anyone can make predictions that way. For example by the end my life my bank balance will be $4.7 million (CI $5.…

> You can define growth rate of a plant this way: define a standardized lab environment [...]

If the standardized lab environment is dry and sunny, then you'll conclude that a cactus grows faster than a fern, since the ferns will mostly shrivel up and die. If the standardized lab environment is moist and shaded, then you'll conclude that the fern grows faster, since cactuses will mostly die for lack of sun. So which is right?

The concept that you're looking for simply doesn't exist--the growth rate of an organism can't be defined except with reference to its environment, which for a virus that infects humans includes human behavior. (What rate of condom use should the standardized lab environment for HIV correspond to? How will you model the increased popularity of fentanyl?)

You are looking for CS-level rigor and simplicity in biology, but biology doesn't work like that. You are correct that many biological results were thus oversold to the public during the pandemic; but you're once again criticizing those public-facing oversimplifications, not any science as a practitioner would understand it.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#288

Post by tripletao »

mike_hearn wrote: post #284
tripletao wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To get meaningfully constant values for infectiousness you'd probably need a theory that let you derive it from RNA sequences. As others have already noted in this thread, the rate at which a disease spreads inherently depends on both the biology of the pathogen and human behavior. For example, if everyone goes to crowded nightclubs, then R0 for an airborne respiratory disease goes up. If everyone stays home, then…

No, I'm not confused about any of this. I'm giving the textbook definition in this thread, right? I'm sure even sure why you are arguing with me instead of the user who started the thread by giving specific R0 numbers for influenza and SARS-CoV-2. As you say, you can't do that because R0s are characteristics of outbreaks, not viruses. So the confusion is the other way around. An outsider to the field would think R0 w…

The suggestion that SARS-CoV-2 spreads faster than influenza because two studies on different populations at different times found R0 of 2.5 vs. 1.7 respectively is indeed false--that difference is obviously within the expected spread from different environments. I thought the top reply to that comment (quoting Wikipedia) clearly implied that, so I didn't think any further effort there was required. You posted other statements that were false in different ways, so I responded to those.

That said, SARS-CoV-2 really does spread faster than influenza; among other reasons, we know this because influenza cases went almost to zero during the pandemic, implying that the same behavior in the same population that clearly resulted in R0 > 1 for SARS-CoV-2 resulted in R0 It's pretty common to reduce a time series to a single number. For example, in economics, it's common to look at a compound growth rate per year, averaged over the period of interest. Likewise, in epidemiology, it's common to look at a compound growth rate per estimated serial interval, averaged over the outbreak and corrected for immunity acquired during the outbreak. That's R0, with all the convenience and all the flaws of any other simple aggregate statistic.

> Therefore, my suggestion - meant constructively! - is to rebase the field on top of microbiological theory. Scrap the models for now. Delete "and everything else" from the R0 definition and come up with an algorithm to compute a measure of infectiousness from DNA/RNA or lab experiments only.

I hope you realize that biologists aren't all stupid? If they could somehow define "infectiousness of the pathogen alone, without environmental factors", then that would be incredibly useful, removing all the factors that complicate comparisons of R0. The fact that they've made no attempt to do so should be a clue that the concept that you're wishing for simply doesn't exist.

They do study growth rates in cell culture, or the amount of virus exhaled by a sick lab animal, or the amount of virus that a healthy lab animal must inhale to get infected with some probability. Those are well-defined and somewhat repeatable lab measurements, but they're not very predictive of spread in actual humans. Computational methods are even less predictive; the idea of calculating infectiousness in humans from a viral genome is mostly science fiction for now. They're trying, but this may be harder than you think.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#289

Post by DrThunder »

shlant wrote: post #169
DrThunder wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the hospitals really couldn't do anything to help these people anyway and in some cases actually sped up their death with use of ventilators. Even more frustrating, they could have been giving things like monoclonal antibodies right away but they didn't. Additionally, hospitals had years to figure out a better way of expanding their ICU's for emergency use. They also tend to operate on lowest required beds to…

> in some cases actually sped up their death with use of ventilators The ventilator argument is brought up a lot so I wanted to share an article going over the related evidence: "Based on the evidence at hand, we can reasonably say that there probably wasn’t a large impact either way from early intubation treatment paradigms."[1] [1] https://archive.li/RNzwh#selection-1077.0-1077.148

So it was useless? Okay, then the idea lockdowns were needed for hospitals with useless treatments is still bad.

Re: In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

#290

Post by DrThunder »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #224
DrThunder wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the hospitals really couldn't do anything to help these people anyway and in some cases actually sped up their death with use of ventilators. Even more frustrating, they could have been giving things like monoclonal antibodies right away but they didn't. Additionally, hospitals had years to figure out a better way of expanding their ICU's for emergency use. They also tend to operate on lowest required beds to…

> Except the hospitals really couldn't do anything to help these people anyway and in some cases actually sped up their death with use of ventilators. Even more frustrating, they could have been giving things like monoclonal antibodies right away but they didn't. Uninformed and wrong. ICU staff worked through extreme conditions to save many. Ask a few how much better their patients would have fared at home instead. >…

Statistical proof please. I don't care about your anecdotal evidence, especially when it was used for authoritarian lockdown measures that resulted in things just as bad or WORSE than what COVID caused.
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